What can you create with a 3-D printer, 61 pounds of aluminum powder and some carbon-fiber tubing? If you're California entrepreneur Kevin Czinger, you've got enough to start making Blade: a revolutionary new sports car with a 3-D printed chassis. (See video footage here.)

Only one such car exists right now. But Czinger is hoping that his new-age approach to manufacturing will catch on in a huge way, with the eventual goal of radically reducing the weight, costs and environmental toll of making cars around the world.

Czinger's car makes its public debut today at the O'Reilly Solid conference in San Francisco. This particular machine is better suited to the race track than the morning commute: it's a bobsled-style two-seater (one front, one back), with huge gull-wing doors and a 700-horsepower engine. Thanks to a super-light chassis, the car weighs only about 1,400 pounds.

There's no reason, though, Czinger said in an interview, that the lightweight design methods of Blade's chassis can't be applied to more traditional car designs. Even pickup trucks or sports-utility vehicles could be built with 3-D printed chassis, he contented.

Czinger, a one-time Goldman Sachs executive, has been trying to shake up the car industry since 2009, when he founded Coda Automotive, a Los Angeles-based electric-car manufacturer. Coda raised more than $200 million but wasn't able to sell more than about 100 cars during its four-year operating lifespan. Czinger stepped down as Coda's chief executive in 2010; the company filed for bankruptcy protection from creditors in 2013.

This time, Czinger isn't committed to doing all the manufacturing himself. He says his new company, Divergent Microfactories, is more interested in licensing its 3-D-printing technology to a new generation of relatively small automakers around the world.

Current automobile factors can require $1 billion of capital investment in metal stamping and other "technologies that date back to the 1920s," Czinger contends. That makes it hard for anyone except global giants to get involved in mass-market car manufacturing.